


Pocket Full of Smiles

by DracoMaleficium



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Behind the Scenes, Character Study, Death of the Family (DCU), Endgame (DCU), Gen, New 52, Oneshot, Secret Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-29 23:52:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11451654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DracoMaleficium/pseuds/DracoMaleficium
Summary: For the prompt "I wish you would write a fic exploring Joker's thoughts during the 52 arc where he was posing as Eric Border."





	Pocket Full of Smiles

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for this prompt, Anon, and sorry it took me this long to get around to it!

Eric Border has a pocket full of smiles.

He keeps it hidden. It’s important to keep it hidden, it and all the other pockets that he carries around with him because for one thing, the face he wears while his name is Eric Border can’t hold the smiles he put there. It’s a shadow face, a _normal person_ face, a bit pointy, a bit gaunt but mostly unremarkable, the kind that smells of detergent and sickness and sometimes shrimp, and sometimes cigarettes and gunpowder and ennui, and sometimes booze of the kind that flows and flows and flows until it doesn’t anymore because something else, something stickier, stinkier, starts to flow instead. 

(The smells vary depending on what bits and snatches he weaves into which story on any given day, whenever he cares to weave a story at all, and he tries not to do that. Stories are distracting. It’s effort enough to open his eyes each day and remember which name he’s supposed to exist under, and feel the tight pressure of a face that’s all wrong.)

Anyway, the point is, this face, the all-wrong face? Too weak by far. If he tried to wear one of those secret pocket smiles on it it’d _crack-crack-crack_ and crumble. That’s what normal people faces do. Wishy washy stuff, sallow and pink in ugly blotches, patched together out of cheap and clammy all-gray everydayness and probably made in China, too. Prod it a little harder — just a little harder — and it all falls apart, just like that, bim bam boom and pop and squish it goes, breaking open and oozing all this pathetic cheapness all over the floor. 

And Eric Border knows this for sure because he’s tried it once, alone, in the ensuite that came with the dark little room they’ve given him, when the all-wrong feeling got a bit too clammy, a bit too suffocating and icky and cloying to endure for another second. He stood there in front of a mirror teetering on the edge of a swirl far darker than he could afford at this point in the game, and panting into the cold bowl of the sink, and staring into eyes that flashed with soothing green reminders that it’s all right, it’s all good, this is all just temporary, all this cheap weakness, just a warm-up act and there’s something bright and strong and true waiting just on the other side, getting ready to shine. 

He tried on one of the smiles, then, just to reassure himself that they were still there.

The fake normal person skin tore under the strain to the point where that dark, throbbing, needy swirl rushed to spill right out onto the dirty tiles until he gagged on it, and he very nearly couldn’t put it all back in. 

He hasn’t risked it again after that. 

So he carries the smiles around in that secret pocket in his head where no one can see, and the smiles he does wear are to the hidden ones like a winter breath is to an ocean hurricane. 

And most of the time, it’s easy. After all, Eric Border has a lot of secret pockets in his head. The trick is to keep those pockets closed while knowing they’re still there, and it’s a tight balancing act but he’s able to keep it going if he just reminds himself of certain things every day.

Like his name. Names are a tricky tricky game, especially when you have so many of them simmering at the back of you all bubbling and popping and hissing steam. One in particular keeps trying to claw and elbow out of its pocket, especially when he lets himself sleep because the dreams that inevitably pull him in have things like waterfalls and burning caves and a hand narrowly missing his and a quiet whisper in his ear, and those things can’t possibly be dreamed by Eric Border, the idealistic, mild-mannered Arkham orderly from Metropolis who has never felt the pain of having his face skinned or his heart broken. 

(So he tries not to sleep. Not too much. The dreams are an indulgence and he needs to measure them out like sweets or else he’ll overdose and fill out like a balloon animal and his current name will grow too small to hold him and it’ll pop and spray this fake plastic skin all over His walls and it’ll be hilarious and —)

Anyway, it’s important, whenever he stirs out of such dreams, to lie in place for as long as it takes for the owner of those dreams to scuttle back into his proper pocket, and to reaffirm, out loud, “My name is Eric Border.”

Only then does he get out of bed, and proceeds to the bathroom, where he repeats the words again, staring into the face born of plastic and not acid. 

“My name is Eric Border,” the face in the mirror says. 

And it smiles, or at least attempts to. It’s the weak whisper-thin approximation of the real thing, but it has to be to help to click the name home. This weak smile is all the man called Eric Border can afford. It helps him believe in the words that the face in the mirror repeats back at him, and it’s important that he believes them. 

If he believes that his name is Eric Border then everyone else will believe it, too.

Including… 

Him.

There’s so much of Him here, in this house. Has to be, what with it being His and all, the Founding Family legacy bled into stone and mortar and gazing at him from the portraits, whispering through the walls, _Intruder, Intruder_. And oh, it’s so much like Him, isn’t it, to invite the monsters into His home like they belong there, which, of course, they do. Maybe not like they belong in their other home, not in the same way, but there’s definitely a sense of kinship between the two big houses and Eric wants to laugh when he thinks about it. 

He doesn’t though. Much like the smiles his laughter is dangerous, so he only ever affords himself a chuckle at best, just to stay safe. Especially when He’s around.

And He’s around a lot. Which makes the balancing act so much more exciting, this thump thump thump of a heart responding, the thrill of risk, _Will He see, will He know?_ and then the sharp dark plunge when He doesn’t. That, too, needs to be managed. It feels too much like another plunge, the one that ended with a splash and a period of darkness he doesn’t care to remember, and as with the smiles, as with the laugh, as with the dreams, it will only take so much of thinking about it before truth comes knocking and claiming them both for another chapter that he’s still in the middle of drafting. 

Still. It stings, and it’s frankly insulting that He’s so ready to trust him the way he is now, soppy and milky and all plastic-fake. 

( _Is this what you want me to be,_ the dream owner hisses from his pocket when they walk together down the corridors, _is this what you think you want, you traitor, you ingrate, you dirty hypocrite_ —) 

He’ll weather the sting though, he’ll endure it gladly as the price he must pay for the smell of leather and kevlar and Gotham and that metallic tang of oil and blood, and for the flutter of bat-wings around his head. For the quiet “Border” and the whispered requests and his phone lighting up with UNKNOWN NUMBER, for the “It’s good to have a man on the inside,” the faith and closeness and the delightful, heady irony of it all. 

For the quiet satisfaction of knowing he holds all the card while He holds none and the dark swirly cloud inside him growing each time their eyes meet and He allows Eric another step closer inside. 

For the face He’ll make when He finally realizes just how blind and stupid He’s been. 

And then there’s also the different, quieter, calmer satisfaction of getting to show everyone else how it’s done. That, too, is ironic, that he’s doing a better job of looking after the inmates than any of the real doctors and orderlies combined. Or maybe it’s not ironic at all. Maybe it’s only natural that the experience of having been on the other side of the bars makes him all the more suited for the job, and maybe if it wasn’t for all the pockets in his mind he’d consider sticking with it and making doctor one of these days. 

He knows he could. He could do and be anything if he put his mind to it, so maybe it’s a shame his mind is already preoccupied with other pursuits. He thinks probably Bats— that He thinks so too, and it makes the dark stuff inside him rattle all the pockets in insistent defiance, in _NO I will not be like them I don’t care if you want me to this is just temporary and you’re going to have to make your peace with that I love you I need you and you need me if you’ll only just admit it —_

The thoughts break out more and more, the hissing in his mind getting louder. That’s how he knows that it won’t be long now. The fake plasticky skin is getting too tight day after day. The house whispers to him, and so does the city. He smiles when he faces it with the window in the way, and the smile stretches by a fraction, already pulling into something bigger. 

Eric Border has a pocket full of smiles.

And he’s about to turn the key.


End file.
